1. Sticker... Own art direction or nice side phenomenon and why ?
Definitely more than a nice sideshow, at least for me - I do my art almost exclusively on stickers. With stickers you can be very flexible: You can use them like a tag or bombing in classic graffiti for the “Getting up”, means the 'Hello, I was here - remember my name' (or my character). Or you can customize them to refer to the environment they're placed. And you can even compose new, larger pictures from different small pictures, so to speak - I like to call this: painting with adhesive colors. I do the former with vinyl stickers, the last mostly with hand-painted stickers like my Alfred J. Kwak and Henk in Utrecht, where their inventor was born. The compositions are, so to speak, the sticker combos, in which I - like almost everyone in the scene - not only my own stickers. Also, what I like about stickers is that they reward with art those who have an open eye for small things and sometimes unusual places.
2. Own sticker history in key words (first sticker contact, first design, current status, own favorite design, a sticker story ?)
The first contact I had was probably around 2003/2004 through a magazine that featured stickers on their graffiti pages. For me, it was great to learn, because it was finally an art form for me, which I could do as a village child without a car and expensive cans, even during the day in the city. On my first stickers, the classic ones from Deutsche Post, later made from paper and adhesive vinyl, there were no graters, but for example hippos and rhinos.
I created the grater as a character in 2009, strongly inspired by Dave the Chimp and the toast of Stefan Marx. On stickers she appears from 2017, since I had more time for street art again. The first sticker was the lying grater with pillow, meanwhile I have about 30 different designs, more than half of them collabo stickers with other artists*. My favorite sticker - if I can name only one - is the one with Flying Förtress: He was also in the magazine and I'm a huge fan of the Teddy Troopers; that really flashed me when he said after my tribute mash-up that we should do a sticker together! (I'll just let that count as a story now, too, otherwise I'll write a whole novel here...) In general, there is a lot of love in the sticker scene, there you actually meet only good people, in my experience anyway).
3. Favorite sticker artist and / or favorite sticker and why?
I would like to answer this question with a sticker: Take a look at my 'Grater World' sticker - there are many of my favorite artists and inspirations on it! Generally I like it when a character can change and still be recognizable, adapt to the environment (or with other characters) and “Gettin' Up” and so...
4. Why this artist name?
Here I should perhaps first clarify that 'Greaty McGrate' is the name of the grater and not my artist name. My tag is actually 'Skep' (from 'skepticism'), but I don't always put that with it... 'Greaty McGrate' is a conflation of the like-sounding words 'grater' and 'greater' or 'grate' and 'great' - I guess that's where my tendency to play with words got me. And it reminds me of the names that come out when you let people on the internet decide on naming owls ('Hooty McOwlface') or trains ('Trainy McTrainface'), for example...
